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Graduate Student Publication: Tyler Cook

August 31, 2017

Graduate Student Publication: Tyler Cook

Tyler Cook

Congratulations to Tyler Cook, whose paper "Deontologists Can Be Moderate” was accepted for publication in The Journal of Value Inquiry. Here’s his abstract: "Considering the abundance of moderate deontologists, one would suspect that moderate deontology is probably a coherent, deontological position. However, Saul Smilansky maintains that the view is actually pluralist, not deontological, and that we should understand deontology only in its typical absolutist form. The objective of this essay is to show that, contra Smilansky, moderate deontology is properly understood as a deontological theory, and I hope to accomplish some conceptual clarification in the process regarding certain aspects of the theory. In particular, I will emphasize the primacy of deontological constraints in moderate deontology, discuss the normative implications of permissible constraints violations, and conclude with a succinct explanation of a point on which I partly agree with Smilansky concerning the significance of terminology in our normative theorizing."